Stomach Flu Prevention

Understanding the main steps that you can do for stomach prevention will indeed make it easier for you to know the causes of stomach flu and how the diseases behave when spreading.

Stomach flu, or also usually called as viral gastroenteritis by most professionals in health industry, is actually caused by the infection of virus in your body. Therefore, it not really an influenza type of disease. But still, the term of calling it stomach flu is actually very common and now become a part of the language, even in the medical term.

The infection of viral gastroenteritis usually begins when one of the viruses that can cause it enters the digestive system. Usually, this will be done through the mouth of the patient. The dangerous thing about this is that the virus can spread through the air via the air currents around you. Therefore, if you have someone in your house who is having stomach flu, there might be a change that the virus is circulating inside your house. You should always clean your counter tops, sinks, bathrooms, and other places that might be frequently touch by your family members. Cleaning them will help greatly to reduce the chance of spreading stomach flu.

Meanwhile, this kind of disease can also be spread from one person to others. Usually, gastroenteritis will be contagious is you kiss, touch, or shake hands with the person who is having it, even when they haven’t shown any symptoms yet.

Other than that, eating the foods that were touched by people with stomach flu is also an easy way to get the virus to your body. This fact is actually one of the reasons why people who work in restaurants need to wash their hands frequently with soaps and clean water. Meanwhile, if you are at home, you should also make sure that you don’t share glasses, plates and other eating utensils with the patients. Also, ensure that you always wash the clothes of the infected persons as soon as possible.

Preventing the stomach flu can also be done by checking the foods that you want to buy. If possible, avoid buying foods from unclean places, such as farmers market who use unclean water to wash their products.

But the best thing that you can do to prevent stomach flu is to wash your hand diligently. The idea of this practice is to get rid of the bacteria from your hand before touching anything, especially your foods. Not only important before eating a meal, but washing your hand is also recommended after leaving the bathroom or changing your kids’ diaper. Usually, it is recommended that you use running clean water and soap to make sure you clean your hand thoroughly.

Hand gels that contain alcohol is also very popular lately to clean bacteria from your hands. The great thing is that they can also provide protection from stomach flu infection if you use it properly. This should also be considered as one of the main prevention’s from stomach flu.

If you suspect that your family member might have stomach flu, you should make them stay away from kitchen or even cook foods that will be served for others. If you are the one that has it, make sure that you don’t cook anything for your family for at least three days after all symptoms go away. While those are not the practical choice for your family, it will indeed prevent the infection to be contagious to other people in your household.

You should also understand that preventing stomach flu is pretty hard. You will need to spend a lot of time to clean your floors, counter tops, sinks and other areas that get frequently accessed by people in your house. If you want, you can also get some commercial disinfectant to make sure that the bacteria go away thoroughly from your house. You can also easily mix bleach and clean water and use it as the home made disinfectant that will work just fine.

As of right now, there are two types of vaccines that have been approved to be used for stomach flu prevention. Unfortunately, both of them will only work for one type of virus. Usually, the vaccines are given to kids to avoid them getting sick and having diarrhea. The vaccines are given along with other essential vaccines when they are toddlers.

While researches have made a lot of progress on finding the vaccines that can prevent stomach flu, there has not been major development and publication at the time this article was written.